Did Peter Mooslechner, an executive director of Austria's central bank, interviewed this week by Daniela Cambone of Kitco News on the sidelines of the London Bullion Market Association conference in Vienna, say that Asian central banks are using their gold reserves for market intervention?

That's what Mooslechner seems to have said, even as Cambone had not asked particularly about gold market intervention and did not pick up on his comment.

-- Cambone asks Mooslechner what role he thinks central bank gold reserves should be playing.

Mooslechner replies: "I think for small countries it's more or less this buffer role in the end. It's quite different, I think, for central banks in Asia, for example, where they are increasing their reserves a lot and they are much more active in using also their reserves in trading in the market and intervening into the market."

... Dispatch continues below ...

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Mooslechner's thought about the interventional purposes of central bank gold reserves isn't entirely new. On Page 31 of its annual report for 2003 -- and very possibly in its annual reports before and after that year, as GATA hasn't looked -- the Reserve Bank of Australia said: "Foreign currency reserve assets and gold are held primarily to support intervention in the foreign exchange market":

http://www.gata.org/files/ReserveBankofAustralia2003.pdf [3]

What is disputed or, these days, more often simply ignored is whether central banks are surreptitiously intervening in the gold market and other markets, rigging them and thereby distorting all prices and destroying all markets.

So what an opportunity was missed in Cambone's interview of Mooslechner. A central banker actually volunteered to her an opening to the financial story of the age, and instead of seizing it she let it pass rather than follow up. Maybe Cambone even took Mooslechner aside after the interview and scolded him for approaching such relevance in public.

Of course other financial journalists could exploit the opportunity Cambone flubbed or rejected, as the Oesterreichische Nationalbank has published its address and telephone number --

https://www.oenb.at/en/Contact.html [4]

-- and presumably there's a telephone on Mooslechner's desk, and maybe he still can be reached there and asked to elaborate on what he knows about central bank intervention in the gold market. Does any financial journalist have the nerve to make the call?